Audition (85 page)

Erik has since been transferred four hours away to Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California, and Tammi can only visit him on weekends. Lyle has been moved, too, to Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California. Each brother has appealed his sentence but to no avail. Erik’s worst fears have played out; the brothers haven’t been allowed to see or speak to each other in more than a decade. They can write to each other, but the letters are opened and read by the authorities.

Erik writes to me to this day. He is the only convicted murderer I’ve stayed in touch with. Do I think what he did was hideous? Yes, of course. Does he think what he did was hideous? Yes. At least he says so. His letters are intelligent, sensitive, and uncomplaining. Erik will probably never be released from prison, and I wonder again and again how this man I have just described as intelligent and sensitive could have cold-bloodedly shot both of his parents to death. As I’ve said before about Erik and all the murderers I’ve interviewed, I can feel empathy toward them as human beings, but I just cannot comprehend their crimes.

Uncommon Criminals

N
OT EVERYONE WHO MAKES
the headlines and draws big television ratings is a convicted murderer. Other big hits are convicted white-collar multimillionaires like Martha Stewart and Michael Milken, the so-called “king of junk bonds.” So, in high-profile cases, are the families of both the accused and the victims. When there is a trial as sensational as that of O. J. Simpson, practically everyone involved is someone you want to talk with. Sometimes, too, the criminals turn out not to be criminals. That makes for particularly intriguing stuff.

Let’s start with a case in point, Patricia Hearst, the daughter of Randolph Hearst, chairman of the Hearst publishing empire. To this day no one is really certain whether Patty Hearst was a criminal or a victim.

Nineteen-year-old Patty Hearst burst into the headlines in February 1974 when a homegrown armed revolutionary group called the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped her from the Berkeley town house she was sharing with her fiancé, and stuffed her, in her nightgown, into the trunk of their car. A week later the SLA released an audiotape on which she was heard pleading for her life. However chilling, that was to be expected. What was unexpected was the image caught on a security tape two months later of Patty at a bank robbery, cradling a machine gun in her arms. “I am Tania,” Hearst said, using her new
nom de guerre.
“Up against the wall, motherfuckers.” And so the rich, privileged heiress was transformed from being a sympathetic kidnap victim to an obscene wanted felon.

Hearst was finally captured in September 1975. Her trial, in the days before Court TV, filled the newspapers day after day. Her defense tried but failed to cast her as a victim of brainwashing and intimidation; the jury found Hearst guilty of armed robbery and she was sentenced to seven years in prison. I visited her there soon after I started at ABC. She wasn’t allowed to give an interview, but I wanted to meet her in the hope she would give me one when she got out. Seeing her in federal prison was a surreal experience. Hearst had completed her reversion back to her pre–urban guerrilla days. Gone was her signature military beret, the dyed red hair, the cocky aggressiveness she had assumed with that machine gun in her arms. She was quiet and polite.

Visiting her in prison led to my interview with her in 1981, the first she gave after her early release from prison. (Hearst spent only twenty-two months in prison because President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence to time served. Later President Bill Clinton would grant her a full pardon. The country seemed to agree that it was the right thing to do.) Our conversation was both chilling and puzzling. The chilling part included the fifty-seven days she spent blindfolded and locked in a closet after she was kidnapped, the sex she was forced to have with the members of the SLA, their threats to kill her. The puzzling part was why, given many opportunities, she didn’t escape or even phone home. “At one point you found yourself in a motel in Las Vegas. You were alone, absolutely alone, for several days. You could have picked up the phone and called your parents, just to say, ‘I’m okay.’ You never did. Why?”

“I just couldn’t,” she answered. “It seems not only improbable, but it just seems so implausible. It never crossed my mind to call them. After everything they [the SLA] had done to me, my thinking was so twisted that I really believed that I could not go and turn myself in without being killed.”

What I remember most from that interview was not what Patty Hearst said, but how dead voiced she was. Here she was describing the horrific things that had happened to her in an expressionless monotone with no emotion. I was more emotional than she was. There were no tears, no guilt. It was as if the memories had been wiped out of her consciousness and she was reading from somebody else’s text. Was that her way of coping? Had she gone through so much that any emotion was too much? I couldn’t tell.

What also stands out was her absolutely beautiful baby, Lydia. After her release from prison, Patty married a San Francisco policeman, Bernard Shaw, one of her bodyguards. They were living a quiet life then in a well-protected, unpretentious house in an upper-middle-class suburb of San Francisco. They are still married, now have two grown daughters, and live in Wilton, Connecticut. The last time I saw Patty was of all places at a polo match that Camilla Parker Bowles invited me to on the outskirts of London (her future husband, Prince Charles, was playing). Patty was there with her beautiful, now grown daughter, the adorable baby I remembered so well. Lydia is a model, and Patty, for the most part, leads a quiet suburban life. She did not take her experience and say, “I’m going to spend my life doing something important.” It’s as if it never happened.

Now, one of the most sensational stories I ever covered. In 1996 and throughout the next year, television viewers were glued to their sets to get the latest news about a beautiful, blond little six-year-old girl named JonBenet Ramsey, who was murdered on Christmas Day in her family’s Boulder, Colorado, home. The tragic murder of the girl was even more lurid because there was so much footage of her parading around at child beauty contests wearing lipstick, mascara, and suggestive adult clothing. (The images sparked a national tut-tut about the child beauty contests and the adult sexuality they overlaid on JonBenet and her fellow prepubescent contestants.) The discovery of her strangled body in the family’s basement, her skull fractured, and her neck bound with nylon cord twisted tight with a paintbrush handle, was horrifying. So was the blood in her underpants and on her Barbie nightgown. Was it a botched kidnapping? A ransom note was found on the stairs. Or was that a coverup for the sexual molestation that ended in her violent death? And if so, who did it?

Her parents were a respected couple named John and Patsy Ramsey, who, by all accounts, were loving parents. They insisted from the beginning that an intruder had entered their house, hid until they were asleep, and then hideously murdered their daughter. But accusatory fingers were immediately pointed at JonBenet’s mother, Patsy, a former beauty queen herself (Miss West Virginia). Had she, the papers screeched, lost her temper after JonBenet wet her bed on Christmas Eve and in anger killed her? John Ramsey was also a target. Did he sexually assault and kill his daughter? Even JonBenet’s nine-year-old brother, Burke, drew early attention but was discounted as a suspect because the police believed he didn’t have the strength. For months and then years, the focus was on JonBenet’s parents. Grieving for the daughter they professed to adore, they also had to live with constant investigations and accusations of guilt of this most awful crime. (It was only later disclosed that thirty-eight registered sex offenders lived within two miles of the Ramseys.)

In 1998, two years after the murder, the case against John and Patsy Ramsey went before a grand jury. The jurors deliberated for thirteen months. Their decision finally came down in October 1999. There was insufficient evidence to indict either one—or both—in JonBenet’s murder. But the rumors and accusations continued. Even today some think the Ramseys were guilty.

Everyone of course wanted to interview them. I followed my usual route, writing letters and talking to them several times over the phone. I told them that they could finally let people see them when they were not looking harassed and cornered. They could calmly present their case. They had seen many of my past interviews and said they would think about it. Another year passed, and finally the Ramseys agreed to be interviewed. (It often takes this long, or longer, to obtain an interview.)

The Ramseys didn’t reveal any new information. They had none to give. But just listening to them was wrenching. “I saw her lying on the floor on a white blanket,” John Ramsey said in a tight, tortured voice. “Her hands were tied above her head. She had tape over her mouth. Her eyes were closed. I immediately knelt down over her, felt her cheek, took the tape off her mouth. I tried to untie the cord that was around her arms. I couldn’t get the knot untied.”

John Ramsey said he ran upstairs with his little girl’s body, screaming. “It was like a dream, when you scream but you can’t say anything.” He said he laid JonBenet on the floor of the living room, and Patsy Ramsey rushed in.

Mrs. Ramsey, in anguish, then told me, “I remember seeing her lying there in front of the Christmas tree and I looked at John and he said, ‘She’s dead.’ It felt like my life was in slow motion, and that this was not really happening. I kept saying, ‘No, no, no,’ and I asked God to raise her.”

By the time we finished the hour-long interview, I was convinced, and am to this day, that they had not committed the murder. The Ramseys, it seemed to me, were still in extreme pain, devoted to each other, and adoring of their daughter. They would have had to have been the greatest actors in the world to behave together as they did, if one or both of them were guilty. You could see it in their body language, in the way John Ramsey consoled his wife at times during the interview. Most of all, neither had any record of violent or untoward behavior in their past, and there was no motive for killing a child they had treasured. You don’t strangle a little girl because she wets her bed.

Patsy Ramsey was also a survivor of stage four ovarian cancer. She seemed to be in remission but she knew her cancer could return. At the end of our interview, she talked about her faith in God. “If it weren’t for our faith, there would be no hope of ever seeing JonBenet again. But we know that we will see her again in heaven.” I then quietly asked, “Do you think that JonBenet is in a better place?” Mrs. Ramsey answered, “I would have liked to think that my arms were the best place for JonBenet to be. But she’s in a place where I hope to be one day. I know I will be there.”

The year 2006 marked the tenth anniversary of JonBenet’s still-unsolved death. Patsy Ramsey died of ovarian cancer in June of that year at the age of forty-nine.

Six months later I talked to John Ramsey once again. There seemed to have been a break in the case. A teacher named John Mark Karr had been arrested in Thailand, after confessing to being with JonBenet when she died. “I didn’t want to get my hopes up, even though it was easy to let that happen,” Ramsey told me. The publicity surrounding Karr was enormous. “Ironically, at some point I started feeling sorry for the guy, because he was getting convicted, basically, as we were early on,” Ramsey said. But no conviction ever took place. Karr was subsequently freed because his DNA didn’t match any samples from the crime scene.

Today John Ramsey lives quietly in Atlanta, still hoping that the person who murdered his daughter and all but destroyed his and his wife’s life will finally be apprehended. At the end of this last interview, I asked, as I had asked his wife, what faith meant to him. Here was his answer. “Because of my faith, I know the end of the story. I will be in heaven and I know I will be reunited with Patsy and JonBenet. Finally our story will have an end and a beginning.”

Murders are not the only stories that draw huge ratings. People also love to see the high and mighty fall from their halcyon heights and show up in police mug shots. One who took such a plunge from the top in 1989 was Michael Milken, a billionaire financier who was a highly controversial promoter of what were called “junk bonds.” ( Junk bonds are high-risk bonds that, because of their risk, could and often do pay very high dividends.) In many cases the junk bonds Milken advocated helped a lot of businesses, especially smaller ones which otherwise might not have gotten off the ground. But Milken also made serious mistakes along the way in his zeal to promote the bonds and was charged with ninety-eight counts of racketeering and fraud by none other than Rudy Giuliani, then a district attorney in New York. Milken was a huge name in the investment banking business, and he rapidly became the prototype for what were considered the excesses of the eighties. His photo was in the newspapers almost every day, looking gaunt and wearing a toupee. (That fact didn’t much help his image.) The details of the major charges were extremely complicated, but they were sufficiently understood for a federal grand jury to indict him. After a plea bargain to six lesser securities violations, Milken was sentenced to ten years in jail, a sentence that was later reduced to two years with three years’ probation.

I knew and liked Michael Milken. He was a friend of my then husband, Merv Adelson, and one of the companies he helped to finance was Lorimar, Merv’s production company. Merv and I had spent time in Los Angeles with Milken and his wife, Lori, his high school sweetheart and mother of their three young children. He was brilliant, a visionary, and very much a family man. Though he was a billionaire, he had a relatively modest lifestyle. I remember having hamburgers at their rambling ranch house, which had been built for Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. The ketchup bottles were on the table and we all used paper napkins. Those were early evenings. Milken got up at 3:00 a.m. so he could be in his office by 4:00 because it was already 7:00 a.m. on Wall Street in New York. That all came to a halt, obviously, when the court sent him to a minimum-security work camp in Pleasanton, California, in 1991.